Mii on Parade

In the latest edition of Nintendo's "Iwata Asks" series, in which the company's president interviews the designers of Wii and its applications, Iwata switches focus to the Mii Channel. He chats with Mr. Nogami, former director of Animal Crossing DS and one of two directors of the Mii Channel, about the setup and the functionality.

Nintendo has long experimented with the idea of enabling players create their own avatars, but the Mii Channel system takes these caricatures into a custom-built online community known as Wii Parade. Within this virtual world exists Mii Plaza, a community where gamers' Mii Channel characters can mingle with each other.

"From the very start of this software's development, we wanted to allow the characters created by users to appear in the games. In fact, as long as the software developers make the games compatible with the Mii system, these characters will also be able to appear in the games they produce. One more interesting thing is that the Mii characters do not always feature as the main characters in the games," said Nogami. "You can also find them popping up as faces in the crowd. For instance, in Wii Sports, a Mii you made a while ago and had forgotten about might turn up one day in the spectators' seats. Also, since you can store Mii on your Wii Remote, you can bring your Mii to use on your friend's Wii!"

"To put it simply, Mii Parade is a system that uses the network to allow Mii characters created by many people to mix and mingle," said Mr. Nogami. "You can line up Mii characters in the 'Mii Plaza', but at the start the only Mii characters you will find are those you have created yourself. Over time, however, using the WiiConnect24 system, other users' Mii characters can come and visit. In the same way, your Mii can make an appearance on someone else's Wii, although this won't happen unless the user has authorized it. The user can choose whether or not to allow their Mii to come and go on the network, so the only Mii characters that will appear on someone else's Wii are those where the user has permitted it."

It's possible for Mii Channel characters to interact with other characters from around the globe. "Your Mii can pop up anywhere," said Nogami, adding, "I should point out, though, that your Mii will never go missing from your own Wii."